West Bloomfield. Brooklyn. Fort Lauderdale. Pittsburgh. Colleyville. Poway. Bondi Beach.

This is not a bus schedule. It is a roll-call of tragedy and shame.

Now add Belleville.

Belleville? Where the hell is Belleville?

One answer: It’s situated at the mouth of the Moira River and on the Bay of Quinte.

A third: It’s another stop on the highway of hate.

Let’s linger for a moment on the third answer.

Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, who watched 11 congregants be slain in one Shabbat morning two blocks from where I am typing this essay, would be deeply disapproving of my language here. The rabbi, who this summer stepped down from the pulpit at the Tree of Life synagogue – site of the 2018 massacre that is the most deadly incident of antisemitic violence in American history – has told me that he’s banned the word “hate” from his lexicon. At best he refers to the “H-word.” Mostly, he is simply sickened with horror, a powerful word but not one yet rendered in capital letters.

The Canadian media reacted with horror and a sotto voce “Well, duh” when reporting a few days after the shooting at Congregation Sons of Jacob that the episode was officially declared a hate crime or, as the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) put it, a “deliberate, hate-motivated attack.”

Why it took roughly four days to come to that conclusion is one of the puzzles of the age.

But one element of this incident, perpetrated by a 29-year-old former member of the Canadian infantry who received an involuntary discharge for refusing to take a Covid test, is no mystery: why it occurred on Kol Nidre evening.

It’s quite simply the application of Sutton’s Law to synagogues.

According to (much-discredited) legend, when the Saturday Evening Post writer Mitch Ohnstad asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he answered, “Because that’s where the money is.” If we were to ask the Belle­ville shooter why (and when) he mounted his attack – one undertaken with firearms and gasoline, proving the episode wasn’t prompted by some errant impulse, unless he ordinarily drove around with such items – he might make a reference to Yom Kippur and say that Sons of Jacob was where the Jews were.

The timing, of course, only adds to the poignancy of this incident. It was, no one has forgotten, Yom Kippur when Egypt and Syria, hoping to recover land lost in the 1967 war, mounted an attack on Israel in October 1973.

Where the hell is Belleville?

One place Belleville was: in the conversation at pretty much every synagogue the next day, during Yom Kippur morning.

It was the first thing Rabbi Daniel Fellman said to me when we bumped into each other at Beit Kulanu synagogue that morning. The congregation of 1,300 families is 1.3 miles from Tree of Life. Naturally, sensitivities are high in this neighborhood.

Rabbi Fellman had actually been in Belleville a few weeks earlier; it was the city closest to his daughter’s summer camp. He even remembered where the Tim Horton’s coffee-and-doughnuts outlet was. “It struck me as the quintessentially friendly Canadian town,” he said. “The people there were lovely, kind, and welcoming. I couldn’t have imagined that a place like that would have an incident like this.”

That morning he mentioned it in his sermon. So did many other rabbis.

But the news from Belleville wasn’t even the hook some rabbis needed. The very evening when the shots rang out in that city of 55,071, Rabbi Benjamin Spratt of New York’s Congregation Rodeph Sholom spoke about a new normal, where “Jews are being beaten, stabbed, shot, right here in America,” and said, “We need governments that treat Jewish safety as urgent and precious, and a sacred responsibility.”

Now a word about all that security.

It’s a constant presence at synagogues these days, and not only in the autumn holiday season. I’m always hesitant to write specifically about security, because it serves no public good to publicize details of how public officials and places of worship protect themselves at times of danger. (When I was Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe, White House press secretary Ari Fleisher called the day after the 2001 terror attacks and asked that we not write about George W. Bush’s travel schedule nor the security enhancements at the White House. I agreed immediately, I would do so again.)

But it now is public knowledge that Constable Jeff Smith was stationed outside Sons of Jacob and, even from inside his unmarked car, he heard the gunman tell him, “You are going to die for the Jews.” He didn’t, of course, but his presence there suggested he might have. Instead, he was shot multiple times, including in the head. He now faces a series of surgeries.

He is one of the heroes of this episode, along with Chief Murray Rodd, who dispatched Smith to sit outside the synagogue as a precaution and as part of a longstanding effort by the Belleville Police Department to protect the city’s Jewish citizens. The officer called for backup, Constable Mike McCurdy arrived on the scene, and a gun battle ensued, with dozens of shots fired, including 20 that came the through the stained-glass window at the front of the synagogue. The shooter was killed. No worshippers were injured.

“I hope this is a wake-up call to the government and the whole country,” said synagogue President Norman Weddum, one of about two dozen in the pews when the shooting occurred.

It is long past the hour of awakening.

“We will consider ourselves lucky that there were no lives lost in the synagogue on the holiest day of the year,” Ontario Solicitor- General Michael Kerzner said at a press conference shortly afterward. “But we will never normalize antisemitism or hate of any kind, and let me be clear … I will not ever see my country surrender to hate and to antisemitism.”

Amid all these conflicts and controversies – including Democratic Senate candidate Troy Jackson’s use of the word “genocide” this week to describe Israel’s battle in Gaza, for which he later apologized – only one element of consensus emerges. No one will regret when this campaign is over, for this is not a time when the admonition at the beginning of Psalm 133 (“How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”) is being embraced. Θ

David M. Shribman, who won a Pulitzer Prize as Washington bureau chief of The Boston Globe, is executive editor emeritus of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and McGill University.Another answer: It’s roughly midway between Montreal and Toronto.